“Mitt Romney takes his religion seriously, and he won’t let us know that,” a Mormon scholar told me. “He goes quiet, or dark, on the issue of religion.” Romney not only avoids discussing Mormonism, he rarely discusses his personal history with the church. Most Mormon men end their official connection to the church when they […]

Read more

In Hawaii in 1996, leaders of the Mormon church petitioned the court to intervene in a lawsuit filed by three gay couples who claimed that their constitutional rights were violated when the state denied them marriage licenses. In Alaska in 1988, the church contributed $500,000 to a campaign to define marriage as a union between […]

Read more

First, an attempt to define the odd bubble in which CPAC exists. I am sitting in the press gallery listening to Iowa Congressman Steve King tell a crowd of 3,500 that he orders his interns to replace the energy-efficient light bulbs in his Capitol office with “black-market Edison light bulbs.” “The janitors, Nancy’s [Pelosi] Stasi […]

Read more

So asks a Brooklyn teenager in the question at the heart of Tracie McMillan’s ambitious The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table. Writers on food rarely focus on why people eat what they do when their choices are scant. McMillan, a journalist who has long covered a […]

Read more

In their reporting on the 2004 contest, authors Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis make a compelling argument that Republicans stole the race when they turned what was in reality a narrow 4-percent John Kerry victory into a narrower 2-percent win for George W. Bush. Working in concert with Bush advisor and fellow ideologue Karl Rove, […]

Read more